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Comment by khelloworld | Hacker News Reader

I'm not really sure if they are hurting themselves.

Not in the short run. There is obviously no shortage of developers (who are willing the use the mandated languages) or apps. But I do think they may regret this eventually.

By excluding languages like Scheme, and many others, they are excluding developers who prefer these languages. One could argue that these developers are among the smarter and more creative ones. So, when competitors get their act together, and come out with a similar device that doesn't suck, and an app store alternative that does not have these restrictions, then this is where such developers will go.

Essentially, they're providing the competition with a sizable pool of (often disgruntled) developers. There is no real competition right now, but they're making it more likely that there will be, in a year or two.

Anyway, just my $0.99... :-)

The elves will leave Middle Earth, and they will truly be left with nothing but fart apps. They need to fix this clause, fast.

As much as I'd like to agree with you, that is simply not going to happen. Do you seriously think companies/developers like EA, Cultured Code, Omni Group etc are going to leave the app store just because apps written in Scheme or Actionscript or .Net are not welcome on the app store?

Again, as much as I'd like to agree with you, none of the prominent app developers are going to be leaving anytime soon. And, as for people who make Farting apps, they probably wont care anyways because use Objective-C or Actionscript, the apps are rather simple anyways. The efficiency of writing code probably wont matter to them.

EA's games are in violation of this rule, due to using Lua. Think again.

Then either EA will rewrite it, or they'll pay Apple a shedload of money to forget about it.

They certainly won't start whining about it.

No, Apply will just selectively turn a blind eye when it's convenient for them, and arbitrarily apply the restriction in other cases. Evil.

Expected. There's a three tier system- Tier A partners like EA, Tier B developers that are preferred by Apple, like Cultured Code, Omni, and TapTapTap, and Tier C developers, who Apple doesn't do anything special for. Kick ass for a sustained period of time and you can get into Tier B, be a multi-billion dollar company and you're Tier A.

Awesome thing is, though, that you can reasonably compete as a Tier C developer with Tier B and Tier A developers, it's just that they get a head start with being featured. That's surmountable, so it's not a big deal.

How am I supposed to catch up with them if they already are allowed to use features and languages and thought processes that I'm not? It makes no sense.

Compete with them on Android, perhaps? </modest-proposal>

The same way everyone else has- this shit's not rocket science. You just have to be on your game. It's about marketing, not features and languages.

That's called exercising discretion. It happens under the real laws too. I don't think you know what "evil" means.

You are wrong, selective enforcement is evil.

Don't be daft. What makes you think Businesses have to treat everyone fairly? If business A wants to do some special deal with business B that gives B special access or the ability to do things that no one else is allowed to, that's just life. It's by no means evil.

Selective enforcement implies a binary decision. This is rarely the case with legal matters: most of the time some discretion is required (even expected) as part of enforcement. This is what judges and juries are for under the common and statutory laws and in interpreting contract obligations.

That's not evil lol

They're a business.

Definitely. After all, other closed restrictive platforms such as games consoles only contain rubbish.

For every clojure zealot, there are probably 10 objective-c developers who will be happy with less competition.

This is a mistaken claim. Naughty Dog, for example, uses a precompilation phase in their games involving Lisp that builds into machine and graphics code. Most games, too, have a dynamic runtime in the form of a customized scripting engine in their game, tailored to the needs of their game. Sometimes this is done with a pre-existing language like Lua, sometimes it's built from scratch, like UnrealScript (Unreal1 - 3 engines). All of these are now banned.

Interpreters that run on the iphone have always been banned.

Before, it was just interpreters that could load in external code, i.e. user input or the internet. Now, they are all banned.

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